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As a good wife does… This weekend I supported my husband as he hosted his first event, that he planned.. on his own. Now not everything went as smoothly as it could’ve gone. He did have some issues with the live feed that he was streaming from and needed to switch over to a different feed but luckily nobody missed any of the important plays.

Below is one of the shirts that were provided by Riot, the company that owns League of Legends. We had a large amount of swag and had an awesome time throwing stuff out to people. The t-shirts were a big hit and many people asked if we had any left at the end of the night. Too bad they only sent us like 11 shirts.

This was my shirt – Tainne is my summoner name on LoL, so if you see this and play don’t be shy and give me a shout – It took me an hour to play with the shapes and iron it on the back of my shirt. Although it took me longer to find printer paper that was designed for ironing onto clothing.

Later I will chuck up some of the pictures that I took from the event after I have edited them. Who knew that it was really hard to take good pictures in a dark cinema. I’m really shocked at how hard it was considering so many people film movies then illegally download onto the internet!

In a few hours I will be posting up about my new 30 days to an Organised House. It will be free, so check it out 😀

So I know that I’m not the best when it comes to remembering that I need to blog. I am making a resolution for next year to blog atleast once every single day. I’m really enthusiastic that I can accomplish this but I am going to need to find some inspiration otherwise I will forget to blog or be stuck on what I could write about.

I’ve been struggling on what to write to you guys and I know that if I stop blogging now that I won’t return and continue this new venture. Recently not alot has been going on in my life. I’ve dropped Zeke off at school, stayed home nursing my sick husband and looking after our 3 year old Dimitri. Life is pretty relaxed.

BUT! I am planning a holiday with my husband to Melbourne, AUS, in two weeks for the annual Penny Arcade Expo. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is a gaming convention. My husband is very invested in playing League of Legends. I actually helped him organise a viewing party for their World Championship. This involved talking to many people, and seeing how many would be interested in sponsoring the event so that we can give away prizes. Luckily Riot (League of Legends creators) have supplied us with a stash of ‘swag’ which means we will have cute stuff to give away!

Come to think of it, I’ve actually got a bit to say on how I’ve been preparing for my trip away with my husband. As you know, money is a big issue in our house. On one income it seems like any time we move on with a bill, another one comes to replace it. We’ve been budgeting hard to make sure that we had enough money for this trip, including selling our spare TV and other stuff that we haven’t used in awhile. I’ve made sure to manage our time down there as I want to go and visit some friends, visit the University about starting next summer, seeing what course they offer and of course looking at Melbourne’s world class shopping centre in Chadstone. This trip included planning a sitter for the children, planning meals while down there, planning money for knick knacks if we buy anything, making sure that we had a suitcase big enough for both of our clothes for 3 days and planning for any sudden weather changes. Lots of planning!

Planning is my life, it is what I want to do as a career! I want to become a professional planner, planning people’s lives for them and making sure that they are efficient at managing their time. Maybe even becoming a teacher, to teach others everything that I’ve been learning!

If you follow my instagram you will see the finished product that is next years planner. Right now I am customising a planner to finish off the rest of this year in the same format and prepare myself for next year.

Currently I am working on preparing my first youtube video demonstrating how I’ve decided to plan out my days and everything that I usually include in my planner, such as what I’ve eaten, what I’ve done, my cleaning schedule, the children’s schedule, sometimes I need to pick up my son if his step-mother can’t etc. I also plan my husbands schedule in my planner because he is forgetful and doesn’t enjoy planning as much as I do.

Today is the day that I am getting my binder, bound. I’m so excited to look at the different options available! If you’ve got me on instagram @plantaylor then you’ve already got a sneak peak of the printed planner. I am looking forward to having it in action. Seriously considering printing off the last few months of this year and having them bound aswell!

Well to answer any questions, it is almost completed. I have printed all the pages that I wanted to print and tomorrow morning I am off to Officeworks to get it printed & ready for next year! I will happily link to all the sources that I used in the creation of my planner and a few others that I found to be a good idea but didn’t fit well with my planner colour scheme.

Firstly we have The Handemade Home which I mentioned in my previous post, I used her planner pages as my main pages for weeks, and calender months. I love how she used the same colours from last year and I was able to use a couple of her ‘bonus’ pages. I’m looking towards next years planner already, she will definitely be my first stop!

I felt like I needed a few pages that summarised my financials and made sure that I stayed on track with my spending, because everyone knows that women love to spend money! I found this wonderful blog by Thirty Handmade Days and she has had her husband create wonderful free budget binder printables. I will be utilising the savings, yearly income, outstanding debts and monthly budgeting pages because they are relevant to me but she has other useful pages that might work better for you.

I fell in love with this planner printable by Miss Tiina but I was looking for a way to keep the cost to a minimal. Unfortunately this year I didn’t include her in my planner but I am hoping that next year funds will permit me to utilise her cute planner.

Pinterest has been my constant companion on the road to discovering the kind of planner that suits all my needs and will keep my life in order. With two kids, a husband, a debt and not owning our own home yet, planning will become a way of life. I anticipate that 2015 will be a tough year in terms of finances and that planning will be the only way we will keep our heads above water financially.

Thanks in large part to birthdays, school outings and the planning stages of next years planner I haven’t had a chance to come onto the Blog and check in with you guys! So far I have decided that I definitely want an A5 planner and the color scheme will be a simple purple or pink. I went down to my local officeworks (the Australian equivalent of Staples) and sought out their range of filofaxes, inserts for DIy planners and their large collection of post its! HEAVEN! Better still, if I decide that next years planner style isn’t working out for me and I will be using a month by month system to avoid everything getting too bulky and to avoid ending up with a system that doesn’t suit my preferences or my lifestyle. I can’t believe that tomorrow is October already! We had originally had plans to visit Melbourne, VIC for a gaming conference that my husband wanted to go to but unfortunately finances haven’t permitted us to go.

Speaking of finances, it was definitely the biggest motivator to get me to start wanting to plan every aspect of my life. I want to make sure that I have control over the money that comes into our household and when it exits. Especially because my husband is the one with the job while I am at home with our 3 year old. Meal planning is the first tip that we have started implementing into our daily routines to combat the rising cost of groceries. Because we budget month to month, often our budget is stretched very thin to cater for longer months and we always strive to make sure that our bills are paid first. I’m realising that sometimes thats not an option and maybe we might need to move into one of our parents homes til we can afford to either own our own home and have our debts paid off completely or just have our debts paid and move to a state that is cheaper than Darwin, NT is.

I am really excited to start planning the future. I believe that once my husband and I have changed and reformed our spending habits and have created effective ways of being able to splurge a little on things we want and focus on things that we need, we will be okay.

I’m Taylor and welcome to Live by Plan. This idea was created when I was shopping for a planner for 2015, but I couldn’t find anything that was quick & afforable and had the space that I required for my life planning. That is when I had the genius thought that I could just make one instead. Yeah, I know it sounds a little bit out dated and cliche but I had a blast tearing apart my old planner, using the rest of this years pages in it with custom made dividers and beautiful scrapbook paper. I even printed cute DIY planner months from Ashley over at The HandMade Home. I’ll post a picture of my planner in my next blog.

This is just a quick introduction and I will write more on why I’ve chosen to blog about planning in the future. Cheers for stopping by and for giving me your time of day.